This is a site an imaginary, or imaginative, friend of mine Oxbow Lebach created. At least the picture of the guy in the Mexican sombrero looks like someone I know.
He invented The Amazing Swedish MicroTan Tanning System and might know where you can get a hyperdimensional resonator or a flux capacitor or some of the other parts you need to build a time machine, or the best way to use a dishwasher to clean motorcycle parts.
He likes to collect odd facts and stories like Successful Time Travel? - Strange Magazine Interview or maybe the news you get from Weekly World News Reader Survey
He can think up outrageously strange/funny stuff and appreciate goofy humor like The Jerk or more subtle things like Being There Plus he can say a lot of funny things and not crack a smile.
We've worked together for about 17 years now and probably generated as many goofy emails or other funny tales or other on the job jokes, (that at least we think are funny) as anyone who has a theoretically full time job.
We work in a sometimes stressful environment and it's really nice to have someone with a sense of the absurd/funny. Not only is he quick witted to see the funny side of things, but he's played more than a few practical jokes on me.
A couple of examples; one time I took a week long fishing trip to Canada. He found a book of matches from a Canadian Motel and wrote on it "Loved the "fishing" trip with you" and signed it Suzie, then planted it in my briefcase/lunchbox. He thought it would be funny if my wife found it. I guess that was funnier than the time he put the urinal cakes in another guys briefcase.
Another time he sent me an email that made it look like he'd sent an attractive women in our office an email with a doctered-up header, making it look like I'd sent it to her. He'd written, "If I told you, you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me." I took the bait hook line and sinker and thought I must apologize to this woman and explain the situation. I walked to her desk and start babbling about the inappropriate comments about her beautiful body and how it was all a mistake. She's just looking at me, with a confused look on her face. As I'm talking I realize he hadn't actually sent her anything and she thinks I'm off my rocker. ha ha ha.
Someday I might compile the email, and some of the pranks, we have exchanged over the years to see if anyone else thinks they are funny. I should probably wait until he and I retire to protect the innocent. I know he and I can crack each other up. From what I gather most people he shares these gems with, get a kick out of them too.
The nice thing about it is that he's really a helpful guy and has done a lot of good work for the company we work for, for over 25 years. It's interesting that some people can apparently screw around/joke around/fiddle around and get so much done, whereas some unhappy/mean people who apparently work work work work don't seem to get nearly the same amount of productive work done.
I heard a woman on the radio saying yesterday that you have a choice to choose a positive or a negative attitude. She was saying choosing a positive attitude makes your life so much easier. Some people can't help it. We are all wired differently. I feel empathy for people who can't relax and see the funny side. On the other hand if someone is being rude or mean to you or someone you care about it's a little hard at the time to feel empathy...need to take a deep breath and walk away for awhile sometimes.
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It's a rainy Saturday to start our July 4th weekend. Not surprising, for some reason the 4th tends to be cloudy and or rainy most years. It's fine with me since it gives me an excuse to sit still and click on my keyboard. That reminds me of a situation we had years ago at work where a guy who was having a bad day most days complained that we were typing to loud. He also didn't like to hear the phone ring so he would unplug peoples phones when they weren't around. He used to refer to my buddy above and me (at least I think he was talking about us) as either deadwood or clowns. We still like to call each other that...because it seems soooo funny to us anyway. Definitely on the clown-side, but I think the deadwood was a bit harsh. We are still fairly animated, and are able to move our lips and some appendages pretty good.
I have to find the poster that friend made me for the fictitous Crossen Clown School and put it up at work again.
We used to work with a pretty pompous guy that had some really serious ideas about good and evil...and would talk about them at work a lot. They ranged from sort of bizarre theological discussions (this particular standard business form is a creation of the Devil) to typical geek rants on the evil of Microsoft vs the good of Amiga (at that time, he liked Apple too, but he was a big fan of the Amiga).
We were working off- site in an office building near a mall then and skateboarders would use our parking lot or steps to skate around sometimes. This guy would occasionally (seriously) blame the skateboarders for things that went wrong with our computer systems. "Those damn skateboarders probably got in here and were messing with the computers last night." There were cipher locks on our doors...but anyway, my friend and I can't let go of the idea that when things are going wrong at work it has something to do with skateboarders. We crack each other up anyway.
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We have flex time where I work and the ability to work from home on occasion. That's a nice perk. Especially in an area where the freeways can have bad traffic jams anytime of day.
That reminds me of a story my sister told me about where she works. She's a nurse practitioner in a medical office for a government agency. It's the patients, her, a receptionist and sometimes a doctor in the office. She told me that Carol had decided she would work flex time and start coming in at noon and working until late at night. Sis told Carol, "but you're the receptionist. It's kind of important that you are in the office when we are open and people are here."
I just heard another nurse story about an unidentified Dr. (not from my sister) another nurse, another town. She was talking about how the Dr. she was working with had trouble with reports. He had mixed up a high school kid's report with a 60 or 70 year old overweight out of shape real nice guy, who most everyone in the small town knew. For cause of injury the Doc had written, "injured ankle while pole vaulting."
You get some weird medical care in small towns or anywhere I suppose sometimes. Our town dentist was maybe in his 80's before he retired. Getting a little frail. I remember I thought I was going to have to help him yank out a tooth one time (one of my own).
Another time one of my sisters told me she was working as an aide at the hospital when she was about 16 I think. I was quite a bit older and away from home by then. Anyway... In the small town they had - her, a nurse and the Doctor who thought the 70 year old man "injured ankle while pole vaulting" in the delivery room delivering a baby. The nurse thought it was best to concentrate on the woman's head so she was at the head of the bed talking while the woman was in labor. The baby came out and the Dr. handed it to my sister and said, "What's this baby's apgar score?". Not only was she surprised that he handed her the newborn, she said she had no idea what apgar score meant. Luckily she thought quickly, saw a sign on the wall that said something about apgar, and gave the Dr. a snappy reply like "it's a perfect ten". I think apgar means the overall health of the baby or something. The baby and mother turned out fine.
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I've been mulling over the Fair Use Doctrine of Copyrighted material a bit today. I was thinking it was okay to put inline images I'd found other places on the web as long as it was a small part of the work, I attributed them to the author and I was doing it for educational/critical/informational purposes and not for making a profit. I was also thinking any images I used were not put on the web to be sold by the originator anyway...so what was the harm? I'm not plagerizing something as long as I attribute it to the owner.
The law on copyrights is a blurry line. I don't think I'm doing anything wrong but I think I'll cease and desist from sticking any inline pictures that someone else created on my blog. Once I get a new digital camera (our old one got lost) I can create a lot of my own stuff. Plus we have a couple of zillion photographs to scan. Just didn't have any of pictures of Lupine or Slurpees that I needed recently.
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The place where I work has been teaching us what they call Ethics (primarily because of some high profile unethical behaviour on the part of some top executives). Teaching ethics in a public setting is an interesting and controversial subject. Some people might argue that if you don't have a personal compass about what's ethical by the time you are an adult, it's too late to learn them. That may be why some adults are put in jail rather than sent to ethics school.
When I was about 4 or 5 my grandmother and I were in the dime store and I shoplifted some candy. She found out after we left; made me go back to the store, tell the owner and apologize. That was a pretty good lesson. Not that it made me into a saint but it was a lesson anyway.
How do we learn ethics? Hopefully from our parents, friends and teachers. It pretty much is the Golden rule I think, treat others as you would like to be treated.
It gets sticky and blurry though. In my mind I can't quite say a bank robber, for instance, is not an ethical person. Certainly broke one of the ten commandments, our law and is a thief. But does that make them a bad person?
Of course not. Could I follow all our laws, the ten commandments and be a bad person? Of course.
Is being a good person the same as being an ethical person?
I don't even know what ethics means. I can say in the corporate world I live in Ethics has somehow been defined to following a huge set of sometimes convoluted, unclear rules that range from acceptable places for a coffee pot or use of plastic fans, to taking or giving bribes. We had some training years ago where they were telling us it was unethical to accept an item of value more than say a coffee cup from a supplier. Or you should never let a government employee pay for lunch/dinner. My buddy and I made up a bunch of hypothetical cases;
Say you and a vendor's employee are backpacking in the high mountains in the summer and an unexpected winter-like storm comes in and you are trapped. He offers to give you a spare jacket he has in his backpack to save your life. What should you do?
Your mother is an employee of the U.S. Forest Service she wants to buy you lunch for your birthday. What should you do?
The point was that you could never make enough rules to cover every situation and if you had to look up the rule to figure out was right or wrong you're screwed anyway.
Interestingly enough the supervisor teaching the class did not have that opinion and seriously thought we should find our moral/ethical compass in the Company rules. I kind of think he may have had a set of religious rules he followed too. He's a jerk and I don't say that about many people. He is also a trained theologian/minister and from what I gather, goes on overseas missions to help poor blighters of some sort. Still a complete jackass, who would hurt people, lie or whatever and not blink an eye. I don't think he deliberately does things wrong...just a clueless not so nice guy. I guess it's the hyprocrisy that bugs me maybe more than anything. If you are a bastard or bullshitter and admit it and are proud of it that's one thing. I'll calm down now...I don't work in or around him anyway. So who cares.
When I listen to some management folks talk about absurd, impossible or impractical policies I think "is that unethical?" Don't you know that's not true? No one can do that, no one does that, and that doesn't work that way. Is lying unethical? It depends on why you are doing it I guess. If part of being a manager requires "suspension of disbelief" on certain things so you can make a living and feed your kids, I'm not going to fault you. Not my cup of tea but that's fine. Most of my circle of friends think it's best to say what we think is the truth which may detract from an ability to be either a Corporate manager or a politician. Oh well, most of us like being who we are and are no happier or unhappier than people with power or money.
I found this an intersting quote about happiness,
"One finding, for instance, shows that both for people lucky enough to win a lottery and those unlucky souls who become paraplegic from an accident, by a year or so after the events their daily moods are about the same as before the momentous occurrences, indicating that the emotional set point changes little, if at all."
in this article Finding Happiness: Cajole Your Brain to Lean to the Left
Sounds like the Dalai Lama is one happy guy.
Just for the record one of the Company rules, which was serious enough to lead to termination, was "Horseplay" or maybe it was excessive horseplay, I forget things. Never knew what that meant, I thought of it as something like giving someone a noogie or sitting on them and tapping on their chest until they say uncle, but it was one of a dozen or so that was in our old company phone books. Things were simpler then....now we have hundreds of policies and procedures we can read at work to figure out how to do the right thing.
Unfortunately even all those rules it didn't prevent our CEO from using Company funds to remodel his suite at the Four Seasons. We are all sinners I'm not going to throw stones, but we don't need a Corporation to teach us what's right and wrong.
Our society is a little unclear on some lessons. I grew up watching Robin Hood, who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. This guy has some interesting things to say about corporations and government Jim Hightower's Weblog. I read this book awhile back an it has some really interesting commentary Powell's Books - There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos by Jim Hightower.
Reminds me of a bumpersticker I just saw, "I'm For Someone Else For President".
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I just got a free haircut, courtesy of my daugther Rachel, and my wife won a hundred bucks last night playing slot machines. How can I complain? The world is good. Now I have a summer hairdo and enough money for a tank of gas. We have a non-attachment style with money, sort of a Buddhist philosophy I guess. The sun's coming out. I think it's going to be a nice weekend.
Peace to you and yours.
